The Little Red Blog

Saturday Lecture: All Truth Is Social

{Richard Bushman is a Mormon scholar and a respected historian of nineteenth-century America. In the following excerpt, he acknowledges the difficulty of pursuing ‘objective’ scholarship in the face of the myriad personal and social factors that influence everything from our choice of subjects to our selection, arrangement, and interpretation of facts.}

“We all have our tribes.” (Richard Bushman)

Richard Bushman (from “The Social Dimensions of Rationality”):  

We live at a moment in history when the Enlightenment dream of scientific scholarship has been eaten away by doubts about the possibility of scholarly objectivity. A host of thinkers (many of them French) have called into question the very possibility of dispassionate inquiry. They argue not merely that objectivity is an impossible achievement for human beings, who can never detach their minds from the rest of their being, but that the pretense of objectivity is an exercise in self-aggrandizement. Objectivity, they say, disguises a play for power by those who pretend to the authority of objective scholarship when they are every bit as self-interested in the outcome as any religious [or ideological] apologist. The scientific authorities of an era, according to this theory, claim to speak only for truth against error, when in reality they stand to benefit by promoting their particular truth and vanquishing all others. No truth, not even the most rigorously scientific, is objective. All truth is colored by personal interest of some sort.

I am loath to go all the way with such postmodern thinkers, or to relinquish faith in some measure of objective scholarship. We can recognize utterly biased and self-serving scholarship that we know would not hold up under scrutiny, or history writing that is filled with factual errors. We want to reserve the right to correct such corrupted work in the name of some kind of objective truth.

But if we cannot go all the way with critics of the Enlightenment, we can at least admit that no scholarship, no truth, exists in a social vacuum. Though it is rarely mentioned in the work itself, all scholarship is tied to a community of some kind and bears the marks of that community’s influence. Scholarship is the product of people who are located in institutions—universities, research institutes, or circles of like-minded thinkers. They publish their work and want to have it read by others. Their reputations, promotions, pay raises, and appointments depend on how that work is received. When they write, they use the language, the mannerisms, the forms of their scholarly community. In taking an intellectual position, they silently, but inevitably, associate themselves with people of a similar outlook. Scholars take pleasure in hearing references to their work at scholarly meetings or seeing it mentioned in publications. In the scholarly work itself, a conclusion is presented as the outcome of careful scrutiny and rigorous analysis of the facts; but the assumptions, the perspective, the fundamental attitude of the work come from some community, from a society with which the scholar is implicitly and probably quite hopefully associating.

Every form of scholarship is rooted in a society, an imagined community of scholars, in which the teachers or writers live and move and have their being. We cannot take a position on a scholarly issue without implicitly forming or breaking a social relationship. Everything we write and say links us to other people, with all the tangled consequences for our self-esteem, our personal identities, our hopes and aspirations. There is a social and personal dimension to every form of rational discourse, which means that all beliefs, not only religious beliefs, are both rational and irrational.

For example, we may be persuaded rationally that the Book of Mormon is a nineteenth-century production. There may be hundreds of facts we can invoke to sustain this position. But in making that assertion we are forming and breaking human relationships that unavoidably influence our thinking, just as the memories of a religious upbringing (or of a transforming conversion) coil around the work of Mormon apologists.  

I acknowledge my own subjectivity and the influence of a million personal associations. But this recognition of my own limitations makes me deeply skeptical of all who claim to escape their subjectivity, who think they have rid themselves of the prejudices of their tribe. We all have our tribes. The desire to form tribes, to join tribes, to triumph within our tribes, drives and shapes our scholarship. Every form of discourse, every rationality is rooted in a society and serves social purposes. Every truth is socially conditioned and socially motivated. All truth, religious and scientific, is of necessity social truth and is profoundly affected by human associations.

In what, then, can we put our trust? If truth always grows from a particular society, how do we choose among the perplexing confusions of multiple and confusing truths? If the Enlightenment quest has faltered, if the pursuit of knowledge seems mired in subjectivity, and if scholarship is entwined in the corrupting pursuit of power, what can we cling to? What can replace objective scientific truth as a foundation for culture and personal identity?

Where do we go, that is, when we are post-Enlightenment, postmodern, post-everything?

-------------------------------------------------------

 Richard Bushman - Wikipedia

If you have any interest in Mormon history, Richard Bushman should be one of your go-to sources, along with Fawn Brodie, author of No Man Knows My History, a biography of Joseph Smith.

"To an ice floe--go!"

{The title of this post borrows from Whittaker Chambers' 1957 review of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, in which Chambers wrote: "From almost any page of the book, a voice can be heard, commanding: 'To a gas chamber--go!'"} 

American conservatives are surpassingly fond of the late Austrian economist F.A. Hayek, whose 1944 book The Road to Serfdom became a surprise best-seller and quickly attained the status of a right-wing classic. A copy of Hayek’s masterpiece can be found, usually unread, on the bookshelf of every genuine conservative, next to Democracy in America and the Federalist Papers (also unread). ¹

Hayek, however, was too interesting a thinker to be reduced to an intellectual icon. For one thing, as my recent post “Losing Our Nonfactual Beliefs” indicated, he was an agnostic, which put him at odds with the religious elements of the modern conservative movement. His agnosticism prevented him from believing in “God-given” rights; in fact, he rejected the idea that people have any “natural” rights at all. Rights, according to Hayek, arise (or evolve) out of social interactions and are part of the rules which humans design for those interactions. The only rights anyone has are those that a given society, through its laws and customs, recognizes and is willing to enforce.

That said, Hayek offered plenty of red meat for his conservative followers. His final book, The Fatal Conceit, was a direct attack on socialism and on its view of human nature, which he traced back to the baleful influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau:

In any society, conflict between an individual's emotions and what is expected of him in an extended order is virtually inevitable: innate responses tend to break through the network of learnt rules that maintain civilization. It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who first provided literary and intellectual credentials for reactions that cultivated people once dismissed as simply uncouth. Regarding the natural (read `instinctual') as good or desirable is, in his work, an expression of nostalgia for the simple, the primitive, or even the barbarian, based on the conviction that one ought to satisfy his or her desires, rather than to obey shackles allegedly invented and imposed by selfish interests. In a milder form, disappointment at the failure of our traditional morality to produce greater pleasure has recently found expression in the nostalgic idea that “small is beautiful” or in complaints about the “joyless economy,” as well as in much of the literature of “alienation”.

The invocation of “traditional morality” always meets with approval from those on the Right, as does the dismissal of “alienation” as a symptom of selfishness.

On the other hand, The Fatal Conceit contains passages that may take conservatives aback. This next passage, for example, would not pass muster with either the Family Research Council or the Idaho Republican Party:

Mere existence cannot confer a right or moral claim on anyone against any other. Persons or groups may incur duties to particular individuals; but as part of the system of common rules that assist humankind to grow and multiply, not even all existing lives have a moral claim to preservation. A practice that seems so harsh to us—e.g., wherein some Eskimo tribes leave senile members to die at the beginning of their seasonal migration—may well be necessary for them to bring their offspring to the next season. And it is at least an open question whether it is a moral duty to prolong the lives of suffering incurables as long as modern medicine can.

Death panels? Did Friedrich Hayek advocate death panels? Was he in favor of rationing end-of-life healthcare? Worse, was he some sort of moral relativist who, confronted with barbaric tribal customs, simply shrugged and asked, “Who are we to judge?”

Unlike contemporary conservatives, Hayek did not fetishize human life; instead, he subjected it to a rigorous cost/benefit analysis. He believed that those who do not contribute in some measure to society are nothing but “parasites” who have neither any rights in society nor any entitlement to its benefits. ¹ In Hayek’s somewhat Dickensian view (“Are there no workhouses?”), such useless eaters can either get with the program, fend for themselves, or die and reduce the surplus population:

Such questions arise even before we ask to whom such claims can be validly addressed. Rights derive from systems of relations of which the claimant has become a part through helping to maintain them. If he ceases to do so or has never done so (or nobody has done so for him) there exists no ground on which such claims could be founded.

Relations between individuals can exist only as products of their wills, but the mere wish of a claimant can hardly create a duty for others. Only expectations produced by long practice can create duties for the members of the community in which they prevail, which is one reason why prudence must be exercised in the creation of expectations, lest one incur a duty that one cannot fulfill.  

According to Hayek, the bestowing of rights and benefits on persons who do little more than take up space and who do nothing to justify their existence or to earn their place in this crowded world is the fundamental error of socialism:

Socialism has taught many people that they possess claims irrespective of performance, irrespective of participation. In the light of the morals that produced the extended order of civilization, socialists in fact incite people to break the law. Those who claim to have been `alienated' from what most of them apparently never learnt, and who prefer to live as parasitic dropouts, draining the products of a process to which they refuse to contribute, are true followers of Rousseau's appeal for a return to nature, representing as the chief evil those institutions that made possible the formation of an order of human coordination.

Hayek insisted that those who do not or will not play society’s game(s) should not look to society for succor:

I do not question any individual's right voluntarily to withdraw from civilization. But what `entitlements' do such persons have? Are we to subsidize their hermitages? There cannot be any entitlement to be exempted from the rules on which civilization rests. We may be able to assist the weak and disabled, the very young and old, but only if the sane and adult submit to the impersonal discipline which gives us means to do so. ³

In his summation, Professor Hayek chastised his fellow academics for indoctrinating their students with the ill-conceived theories of the past:

It would be quite wrong to regard such errors as originating with the young. They reflect what they are taught, the pronouncements of their parents - and of departments of psychology and sociology of education and the characteristic intellectuals whom they produce - pale reproductions of Rousseau and Marx, Freud and Keynes, transmitted through intellects whose desires have outrun their understanding.

I have, you may surmise, some serious disagreements with Hayek, but to give him his due, I cannot think of a better statement of the human dilemma: "our desires outrun our understanding". To know that may be the beginning of wisdom.

____________________________________________

¹ I say this from personal experience, having once, long ago, joined the Conservative Book Club and having received those volumes among my initial choices. I believe I also received James Burnham’s The Suicide of the West and Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. It was, as I say, long ago, and I was young.

² Of course, one first must define “contribution to society”. You could argue that the chronically unemployed, those on the dole, and the incarcerated all contribute, if only in a perverse way: they serve as cautionary examples, as role models in reverse, and as living proof of the wages of sin. Parasites and losers give the Solid Citizens of the world someone to look down on, someone to whom they can feel superior, and someone to point to as scapegoats for society’s imperfections.  

³ Caution: to acknowledge society’s responsibility to “assist the weak” is to create a loophole big enough for Leviathan itself to slip through and a slope so slippery not even Nancy Kerrigan at her best could maintain her balance.

On the Present Condition of Things

Today’s guest blogger is Prince M. Shcherbatov, who has cast his gaze upon Modernity and found it (Modernity, not his gaze) wanting. In particular, he has observed a decline in morals, manners, and religious faith, as well as an appalling appetite for voluptuousness and luxury:

Looking at the present condition of things, with the eye of a man brought up on strict ancestral rules, whose passions have now weakened with the years, and to whom ample experience has given the enlightenment necessary in order to judge things, I cannot but wonder at the short time in which morals in this country have everywhere become corrupt. I can truly say that, in sociability and various other things, we have made wonderful progress and have taken gigantic steps to improve our outward appearance. But at the same time, with much greater speed, we have hastened to corrupt our morals, and have even come to this: that faith and God’s Law have been extinguished in our hearts, Divine mysteries have fallen into disrepute and civil laws have become objects of scorn. Judges, in cases of every kind, have begun to try, when explaining a case, not so much to reach their verdicts on the basis of the laws, but rather to gain a profit for themselves by corruptly selling justice; or, in order to please some grandee, they try to ascertain what his wishes are; others still, ignorant of and making no effort to learn the laws, rave like lunatics in their judgments, and neither life nor honor nor civil property is safe from such injustices. ¹

Children have no respect for parents and are not ashamed to flout their will openly and to mock their old-fashioned behavior. Parents have no love for their offspring; as if removing a yoke from their shoulders, they gladly entrust the education of their children to strangers; often they sacrifice them for profit, and many have become vendors of their daughters’ honor for the sake of ambition and luxury. There is no genuine love between husbands and wives, who are often coolly indifferent to each other’s adulteries; others, on some slight pretext, destroy the marriage concluded between them by the Church and are not merely unashamed but seem to take pride in this conduct.

There is no family feeling, for the family name counts for nothing, and each person lives for himself. There is no friendship, for everyone will sacrifice a friend for his own advantage. There is no loyalty, for the chief aim of everyone is to deceive others in order to receive lucrative rewards. There is no patriotism, for almost all serve for their own advantage rather than that of the nation; and, far from speaking truth to power, there is not even the strength of character to oppose the lawless and pernicious intentions of those in authority.

Such utter ruination of all good morals must, of course, have certain underlying causes; the chief of these I consider to be voluptuousness. For voluptuousness gives rise to various violent desires, and a man will often stop at nothing to obtain their gratification. Indeed, a man entirely given over to his disorderly desires, and worshipping the reprehensible passions within his heart, thinks little of the Law of God and still less of the country in which he lives. Thinking only of himself, can he be compassionate to his neighbor, or preserve the necessary bonds of family and friendship?

[Prince Shcherbatov then offers examples of virtuous times in history; for instance, “It was not in luxury and voluptuousness that ancient Rome found its protection, but in austerity of morals and in moderation.” Closer to the present, he cites changes made to Russian life and customs by Peter the Great in the early seventeenth century.]

Peter modified the old customs which seemed crude to him. He ordered beards to be shaved off, he abolished the old Russian garments, instead of long robes he compelled the men to wear German coats, and the women to wear bodices, skirts, and gowns. He established various assemblies where the women, hitherto segregated from the company of men, were present with them at entertainments.

It was pleasant for the female sex, who had hitherto been almost slaves in their own homes, to enjoy all the pleasures of society, to adorn themselves with clothes and fineries, which enhanced the beauty of their faces and enhanced their fine figures. It also gave them no small pleasure to see in advance with whom they were to be joined for life, and that the faces of their husbands and betrothed were no longer covered with prickly beards.

On the other hand, it was pleasant for young men who were not set in the old ways to mix freely with the female sex and to be able to see in advance and make the acquaintance of their brides-to-be; for previously they married relying on their parents’ choice.

The passion of love, hitherto almost unknown in an age of crude customs, began to overwhelm sensitive hearts, a change that first made itself felt through the action of the senses. And this meant that women, previously unaware of their beauty, began to realize its power; they began to try to enhance it with suitable clothes, and used far more luxury in their adornments than their ancestors. Oh, how the desire to be pleasing acts upon women’s senses! And if the passion to be pleasing produced such an effect on women, it could not fail to have an effect on men too, who wished to be attractive to them; thus, the same striving after adornment gave rise to the same luxury.

The modern cult of romantic love has launched a thousand advertising campaigns: cosmetics, perfumes, colognes, jewelry, fashion, and many more. Our desire to attract potential romantic partners knows no bounds, nor does our concomitant “striving after adornment”.  

Although Prince Shcherbatov died in 1790, he still has his finger on the beating (if erratic) pulse of modern life. There is even talk that he may contend for the Republican Party’s next presidential nomination: Shcherbatov-Pence, 2024: Taking a Stand Against Voluptuousness!

______________________________

[Excerpts are from M.M. Shcherbatov’s On the Corruption of Morals in Russia.]

¹ Shcherbatov’s critique of the judiciary no doubt refers to (among others) the 1992 landmark Supreme Court case of Casey vs. Planned Parenthood, which ruled, in the words of Justice Anthony Kennedy, that “the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, of the mystery of human life.” Nonsense on stilts! No such “right” exists or could possibly exist, unless you assume that each individual lives in a separate and distinct universe for which he or she may make the rules.

It would be remiss of me not to mention that Prince Shcherbatov, distinguished statesman, historian, prig, and moral scold that he was, also wrote Russia’s first utopian novel, A Journey to the Land of Ophyr:

Ideas about the state system received development in Shcherbatov's utopian work "A Journey to the Land of Ophyr". His main idea was that laws should be based on moral principles and the citizens of the state should honor first virtue, then law, and after that, the king and the authorities. Their lives are dependent, in the first place, on their natural freedom, and after that to their civil responsibilities, which do not try to limit the freedom save only to impose certain duties in relation to the society. In this sense, he believed that people should honor and obey the laws; relationships inside society lie on humane principles and respect for each other and for the monarch, wherein a framework may be created for social balance and political peace within the boundaries of the country.

In that work, Shcherbatov developed his system for the prosperity and well-being of society, the basis of which lay in the idea that honor and respect for the monarch should not be rooted in any form of egoistic servility or hope of receiving a reward. He also supported the idea of a structure within society that is divided into several hierarchical classes, according to which the life of every citizen is regulated. At the top of the pyramid is the king, who should be seen not as almighty but as "the first among equals". Then come the landlords and merchants. The lowest is the class of peasants. Although they were not free, the legislation of the utopian state would require that their masters treat them humanely, provide for their needs, respect their work and refrain from harsh punishment.

Mikhail Shcherbatov - Wikipedia

Amitology, Anyone?

{Should we explore the thinking of Russian émigré sociologist Pitirim Sorokin? Of course we should! It would be wrong not to.} 

I have previously written a bit about Pitirim Sorokin, but here is a brief biographical refresher, courtesy of the online Britannica: 

Pitirim Alexandrovitch Sorokin, (born Jan. 21, 1889, Turya, Russia—died Feb. 10, 1968, Winchester, Mass., U.S.), Russian-American sociologist who founded the department of sociology at Harvard University in 1930. In the history of sociological theory, he is important for distinguishing two kinds of sociocultural systems: “sensate” (empirical, dependent on and encouraging natural sciences) and “ideational” (mystical, anti-intellectual, dependent on authority and faith). ¹ The first professor of sociology at the University of Petrograd (1919–22; St. Petersburg), Sorokin was expelled from the Soviet Union for his anti-Bolshevism. Before going to Harvard, he was on the faculty of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, where he specialized in rural sociology (1924–30). Among his writings are A Systematic Source Book in Rural Sociology, 3 vol. (1930–32); Social and Cultural Dynamics, 4 vol. (1937–41); Man and Society in Calamity (1942); Altruistic Love (1950); and an autobiography, A Long Journey (1963). 

So much for Sorokin’s curriculum vitae; what of his ideology, his worldview? Again, enter Britannica: 

Sorokin believed that the post-medieval Western sensate culture was in its last stages and that the study of non-sexual altruistic love as a science was needed to avert worldwide chaos. In his view, this necessity followed from his principle of polarization, according to which the moral indifference prevailing under ordinary circumstances is supplanted, for the duration of a crisis, by the extremes of selfishness and altruism.  

Sorokin did not believe the medieval worldview could be, or should be, resurrected; for that matter, he acknowledged the impressive accomplishments of “sensate” culture. He felt, however, that sensate culture was arriving at a dead end, undermined by its own contradictions and its own excesses; it needed, Sorokin believed, some leavening from such “ideational” elements as it still contained. In that vein, the “non-sexual altruistic love” he endorsed was—at least on its face—much like the agape of early Christianity: 

[In 1949] Sorokin founded the Harvard Research Center for Creative Altruism, which sought to understand the role of love and altruism in producing a better society. Much of the Center’s research was summarized in Sorokin’s second masterpiece, The Ways and the Power of Love. 

This book offered a comprehensive view on the role of love in positively transforming society. It surveyed the ideals and tactics of the great spiritual reformers of the past – Jesus Christ, the Buddha, St. Francis of Assisi, Gandhi, etc. – looking for common themes and principles. 

We need, according to Sorokin, not only great figures like these, but also ‘ordinary’ individuals who seek to exemplify the same principles within their personal spheres of influence.  Personal change must precede collective change, and nothing transforms a culture more effectively than positive examples. What is essential today, according to Sorokin, is that individuals reorient their thinking and values to a universal perspective – to seek to benefit all human beings, not just oneself or one’s own country.   

Like agape and like the Golden Rule, “creative altruism” is a simple concept which becomes extraordinarily complicated in practice. Moreover, Sorokin believed that we must first escape the trap of “mechanistic materialism, flat empiricism, superficial positivism, and vulgar utilitarianism bound up with the growth of modern culture,” and to do that we needed to understand and then transcend the limitations of the sensate worldview. 

Years after writing The Crisis of Our Age, Sorokin attempted to develop a science of creative altruism, which he called “amitology”: 

Writing in 1951, Sorokin defined Amitology as the applied science or art of developing friendship, mutual aid, and love in individual and intergroup relations. Its goal was to stem the tide of Machiavellianism by providing a blueprint ("guidebook") for mutual service, cooperation, and amity. Amitology focused on determining the characteristics of the altruistic personality; the techniques for developing and using love as a force in social interactions; the influence of "significant others" on prosocial relationships; and the characteristics of an environment that promote altruistic actions. 2   

Neither “amitology” nor “creative altruism” seems to have captured the public attention; for that matter, even Sorokin’s fellow sociologists considered him naïve. Indeed, as Jay Weinstein has written, “The philosophy and techniques of altruism are rarely if ever part of our formal education. Even more serious is the fact that most people, even those who study sociology, have not had the opportunity to reflect on the phenomenon. One gets the impression that when people hear about altruism, they either disregard it as unimportant, or they believe that it is unattainable.” ³  

For whatever complex of reasons, we, as a society, seem to have decided that the single most important element in promoting social cohesion should be learned either by osmosis or in Sunday school.  

My modest proposal for today is that, alongside whatever efforts we make to build children’s healthy self-esteem, we ought to be teaching them as well to practice common, ordinary, everyday altruism. ⁴ As Pitirim Sorkin explained, “Great altruists alone cannot supply even the minimum amount of love and mutual help necessary for any surviving society...it must be furnished by thousands and millions of our plain "good neighbors." Each giving a modest contribution of love, in their totality they produce an enormous amount of “love energy”. Without this moral foundation of the deeds of the "good neighbors" no society can be satisfactory.” ⁵ 

Won’t we be our neighbors? 

______________________ 

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Pitirim-Alexandrovitch-Sorokin Also see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitirim_Sorokin   

¹ Sorokin also identified a third sociocultural model: the “idealistic” model (also referred to as the “integralist” model, which term I prefer) which represented a stable—temporarily, at least—synthesis of the first two. No system, he said, was ever entirely monistic; there were always elements and traces of the out-of-favor system in existence, which elements would contribute to the eventual “integralist” synthesis, which would “harmoniously balance sensate and ideational tendencies.”  https://satyagraha.wordpress.com/2010/08/19/pitirim-sorkin-crisis-of-modernity/ 

² https://library2.usask.ca/sorokin/manuscripts/amitology 

³ https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0423/ccb41a8f740035b00909121c17159b99b632.pdf 

⁴ Practice, despite what you may have heard, rarely makes perfect, but it almost always brings about improvement. Just as important, it is practice which makes any behavior habitual, something we all learn when it comes to our bad habits but which we tend to forget in relation to good ones.

⁵ Pitirim Sorokin, Altruistic Love 

Return of the Blinks

{As the probably non-existent God is my witness, I will get this blog up and running again...}

David Johnson, writing at Aeon, would like us all to stop sucking up to the rich, the powerful, and the inexplicably famous. In "Let Us Now Stop Praising Famous Men and Women," Johnson reminds us, in case we had forgotten, that "We live in an age of excessive praise for the wealthy and powerful." 

Do tell:

The upper echelons of society bathe in a sea of honours, awards and celebrity. We see it in the glossy magazines and at the so-called ideas festivals, where billionaires are fawned over for their bons mots. We applaud philanthropists for their largesse, even if their charity will do little ultimate good for society, and even if their conduct in acquiring their fortune was reprehensible. We commend them for dabbling in politics or pushing school reform, before we see any results, and even if we have reason to doubt the good that they will do.

Johnson dismisses the myth of meritocracy, as well as the "perverse incentives" he claims lead to "the smog of praise that permeates the upper echelons of society." In conclusion, he harrumphs:

If we want to foster a truly democratic society – a society in which we treat each other as equals – we must rein in such excessive praise and the perverse incentives that encourage it. We should aim for the opposite extreme, toward withholding praise and being more circumspect about the wealthy and powerful, to restore balance. As Justice Louis Brandeis, who witnessed our previous Gilded Age, might have said: ‘We may have democracy, or we may have praise showered on the heads of a few, but we can’t have both.’

As a society, we have opted for a fascination with, and a vicarious enjoyment of, "the lifestyles of the rich and famous," thereby rendering us increasing insensible to what Abraham Lincoln, in describing his early life, called "the short and simple annals of the poor". Every man-jack among us is a Jay Gatsby wannabe, hoping to hit the big time and praying no one finds out the truth about how we got there.

Scott Fitzgerald once sighed that the rich are different from the rest of us; yes, said Ernest Hemingway, they have more money. To that we can add: more fame, more respect, more admiration, and more skeletons in their closets. "Behind every great fortune lies a great crime," said Balzac; if we're going to pay attention to the rich and famous, let's do so not by fawning over them but by unmasking their pretensions and exposing their crimes. 

https://aeon.co/ideas/let-us-now-stop-praising-famous-men-and-women

Given that Bryan Caplan's THE CASE AGAINST EDUCATION came out over a year and a half ago, I'm not sure why Max Diamond, reviewing the book for Real Clear Books, calls it "new"; regardless, Diamond's interview with Caplan allows me to reiterate my own anti-education talking points while passing the blame for them to someone else.

Here's how Diamond opens his article:

In his controversial new book, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, economist Bryan Caplan argues that the primary function of American education is not to enhance students' actual skill but to signal and certify the qualities of a good, conformist employee. RealClearBooks recently interviewed Caplan about the rise of credentialism, useless degrees, and why we need to rethink our entire approach to education. 

Caplan's arguments should only be "controversial" to education professionals and to the minority of students (10% would be my guess) who take our current system seriously. Who else would argue when Caplan says:

People do learn some literacy and numeracy in school. But most of what you study in school predictably you’re not going to use after the final exam. You know that you’re not going to become a poet or a professional historian. And so, then there’s the puzzle about why exactly the study of irrelevant subjects would lead to a better career in fields where you don’t even use what you’re taught. And what I say is that most of this is what economists call “signaling.” You are jumping through hoops in order to impress employers. Even though it’s not directly relevant, still it’s a good way of convincing someone who might want to hire you that you’ve got the right stuff. The way I like to describe it is that to a large degree school isn’t really job training, instead it’s a passport to the real training which occurs on the job.

Those who argue that a traditional "liberal arts" education produces individuals who are culturally informed and who possess both depth and breadth in their approach to life certainly have a point--if only such an education were on offer for most students, and if only such individuals were valued in our society over against winners of the birth lottery and amoral sharpers (see above).  Still: are "better educated people" necessarily "better people"? There's not a scintilla of evidence for that. 

As Caplan explains, "credentialing" and "signaling" are the true functions of our current education system, along with keeping kids off the streets and (we hope) out of trouble. Our schools are notably deficient at what we might call "character formation," nor do they reward, as a rule, either the inquisitive mind or the non-conforming temperament; instead, they function primarily as youth detention centers and as ministries of social/cultural propaganda.

Part of the pleasure of reading Diamond's interview with Caplan is to witness the interviewer flailing, attempting to understand how the interviewee's thesis can possibly be correct. Imagine, if you will, the consequences of admitting our schools are mostly pointless.

Why do we persist in miseducating generation after generation of our youth? Caplan has an answer, or at least an informed surmise:

What I think is really going is what George Orwell called double-think. If you just talk to an individual about what they’ve seen I find that almost everyone agrees with me. But as soon as you switch gears to big social theory like what’s the best education system and what should our education policy be, this is where people forget everything they’ve seen with their own eyes and just start talking about how great education is, and how vital it is, and how incredibly useful it is and wonderful. And what I see as the problem is that politics just tends not to calm assessments of what you’ve really seen but to flowery ideas and feel good slogans and that kind of thing. One of my favorite things in all of psychology is what they all social desirability bias. That means that when the truth is ugly, people don’t want to believe it. They certainly don’t want to say it.

Yet truth, ugly as it may be, will set us free, or so it's been said. American schools under-perform not because we don't invest enough money in them and not because we don't have excellent and dedicated teachers; they do so because their mission, purpose, and methodologies are largely misguided. Young children and restless adolescents sitting indoors at desks for hours at a time, cut off from the outside world and from interaction with anyone but age-group peers and over-burdened teachers: there has to be a better way.

https://www.realclearbooks.com/articles/2019/09/09/the_case_against_education_18924.html

   

Dear Jerks: Please Learn Some Manners

It has come to this: The Baffler has published an essay about the importance of good manners, an essay in which the author cites, of all people and I kid you not, Gertrude Himmelfarb. 

Which is not to gainsay the value or the insights of Angela Nagle's "A Tragedy of Manners". Ms. Nagle acknowledges the irony of "manners" talk coming from the Left, just as she acknowledges that one of the more lasting consequences of the Sixties was the wholesale rejection of prudishness and middle-class propriety. It was that rejection which prompted Gertrude Himmelfarb's 1995 invocation of Victorian manners and morals, THE DEMORALIZATION OF SOCIETY.  As Angela Nagle notes: 

The neoconservative historian Gertrude Himmelfarb...drew upon her studies of Victorian England to contend that the post-sixties West would be unable to withstand the chaotic force of modernity without the strict set of manners and social rules that had governed public conduct until then. Western civilization, she argued, was on the brink of nothing less than total “demoralization.” Neocon polemicists—together with a few dour and cultured leftists like Lewis Lapham—also read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as a sign of things to come.  

One could protest that the Boomers in the 1960s were not rejecting manners as such but their trivialization into formal systems of etiquette (Where the hell does the salad fork go? ) unrelated to the real purpose of manners: treating other people, especially people from different cultures and backgrounds (and even people with whom we disagree), with dignity and respect. We Boomers saw a society in which "Please" and "Thank you" were emphasized right alongside separate drinking fountains, separate swimming pools, and separte theater seating for whites and blacks: "Please remove yourself from that seat. Thank you for moving to the back of the bus." That sort of hypocrisy was what enraged us and engaged us; but it's undeniable that we may have thrown out the occasional well-mannered baby along with its tawdry bathwater. 

In any case, Angela Nagle makes a provocative case about the decline in American civility, best exemplified these days by the cult of Trump: 

Amid this ping-pong style search for the prime cause of Trump’s ascendancy, one factor continued to rank extremely high in the postmortem round of election polls: the appeal of Trump’s “tell it like it is” penchant for plain speaking and his corresponding rejection of our current definition of manners. Why would people regard candidate Trump’s comportment in the sphere of polite conduct, propriety, and etiquette—his style of speaking and self-presentation—as something just as important as the core economic elements of his platform? Again, our pundit-seers labored to read this finding as either coded racism or coded anti-elitism. But what if it really was just about manners? 

Comments on the bad manners of Donald Trump have come from a wide array of sources, all along the political spectrum. British Burkean conservative Peter Hitchens called him “an oaf and a yahoo who has gravely damaged the standards of public life.” The editors of National Review found themselves fielding the indefatigable rage of Trump’s online army when they contended, in high Buckleyite fashion, that Trump’s own trollish incivility was a first-order threat to the health of our civilization. Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek said of the new wave of Trumpian rightists that "They represent the decay of common morality and decency. And I use here the very precise term, Hegel calls it Sittlichkeit. It’s not simple morality, it’s a set of thick unwritten rules which makes our social life bearable. And, paradoxically, I think that progressives should become the voice of common decency, politeness, good manners, and so on." 

Ms. Nagle elaborates on the relevance of Zizek's "paradox": 

Žižek was, as is his wont, knowingly using language that would generally make leftists cringe. Beyond the playful counter-intuitive style of Žižek and the more conventional pleas for cultural decency from Hitchens and National Review, most would recoil from using the outmoded, prissy-sounding language of manners today. Such talk seems either hopelessly uptight or ridiculously trivial in a period of such grave political turmoil and upheaval. Yet the question of manners, if not the naming of it, actually claims unusual pride of place in American political and cultural debate—usually via the debased rhetoric plotting out the battle over “political correctness.”  

The same basic paradox assails all spheres of political and cultural confrontation in the Trump era: we instinctively abjure reckoning directly with the subject of manners—and yet it goes to the heart of everything that is happening. There’s a culture-wide unease with the discussion of manners—which in turn conceals a larger and far more momentous breakdown in a viable understanding of manners in today’s America...We’re now in the midst of an extremely fraught renegotiation of the values expressed in our system of manners. Formerly those values stemmed from an understanding on both sides that manners form the fabric of anything we might call society—and that they may prove far more powerful in deciding the fate of a nation, or even a civilization, than any given economic policy or trade deal. 

Ranging wide in the brief space of her essay, Nagle cites the work of sociologist Norbert Elias, of culture critic Robert Hughes, and of controversialist Camille Paglia. She also notes the political Right's fascination with the idea of civilizational decline and its corresponding dismissal of the very notion of Progress: 

Part and parcel of [the] declensionist revival on the right is a challenge to the idea of progress. The urgency of Trump’s appeal for the online right seems to stem from the mounting conviction that the West is rapidly degenerating, usually under the rubric of progress as administered and championed by cultural liberals. Around 2015, 4chan’s /pol/ board popularized a meme using the phrase “Come on it’s (the current year)” to mock naïve progressives like satirist John Oliver. The meme questioned the arbitrary insistence that moving forward in time must necessarily mean having superior values. More recently, a widely shared meme read something like, “1970: ‘I can’t wait for flying cars/space colonies/a cure for cancer’” followed by the year 2017 and some absurd visual representation of contemporary identity politics—like an image of a man who identifies as a dog or an adult baby. The political message is clear: either progress itself is a myth, or we have stopped progressing and started regressing as a civilization and are now intractably sinking into a decivilizing process. 

It is, as I say, a thought-provoking piece, and one which Ms. Nagle concludes in this way: 

The problem in our current, unacknowledged controversy over manners is that while both sides seem to implicitly accept [the importance of manners], they have directly opposing views of what our system of manners should be doing and what values it should be normalizing. As a result, a chaos reigns on all sides; constraints are eagerly thrown off in a gesture of liberation but then elsewhere more harshly enforced than ever. The incoherent tumult of the present moment’s culture wars masks what is, at bottom, a battle over what this shared system of manners will be. And if Trumpism has taught us nothing else, it should be this: the prim-sounding process by which our public manners are defined and negotiated may well be the key to everything else. 

I for one don't care if the table is set according to the Amy Vanderbilt rules or not, and I don't even care if you say "please" when you ask me to pass the gravy. But how about we agree that I'll stop referring to you as a "right-wing moron" if you'll stop calling me a "libtard," and I'll drop the "troglodyte" if you'll drop the "feminazi"? A little respect for each other: is that too much to ask? 

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/a-tragedy-of-manners-nagle  

The Masks of the Status Quo

Conservatives tend to be fond of the late Reinhold Niebuhr, in whose political realism they find a bracing antidote to liberal and progressive daydreams of Utopia.  But Niebuhr, skeptical and cautionary as he was about the limits of politics, also insisted on tearing away the masks of the social status quo, masks which conservatives would prefer stay in place:

“Even if,” Niebuhr wrote (in MORAL MAN AND IMMORAL SOCIETY), “it is granted that differentials in economic rewards are morally justified and socially useful, it is impossible to justify the degree of inequality which complex societies inevitably create…The literature of all ages is filled with rational and moral justifications of these inequalities, but most of them are specious.  If superior abilities and services to society deserve special rewards it may be regarded as axiomatic that the rewards are always higher than the services warrant.”

Noting that “No impartial society determines the rewards” and that “The men of power who control society grant these perquisites to themselves,” Niebuhr states bluntly that “Most rational and social justifications of unequal privilege are clearly afterthoughts…dictated by the desire of men of power to hide the nakedness of their greed, and by the inclination of society itself to veil the brutal facts of human life from itself.”

Niebuhr finds such chicanery “pathetic but understandable,” easily explained by one simple fact: “individuals have a moral code which makes the actions of collective man an outrage to their conscience.  They therefore invent romantic and moral interpretations of the real facts, preferring to obscure rather than reveal the true character of their collective behavior. Sometimes they are as anxious to offer moral justifications for the brutalities from which they suffer as for those they commit”—anything, that is, other than accept the tragic truth that “the facts of man’s collective life easily rob the average individual of confidence in the human enterprise.”  

Bracing stuff indeed, but perhaps not in quite the way conservative admirers of Niebuhr usually intend: Niebuhr is saying that almost all social distinctions, rewards, and privileges are nothing but theft tacitly accepted as the cost of having a society in the first place.  A society that acknowledges that theft will have a hard time resisting calls for reform, redistribution, and even revolution, though Niebuhr would be the first to advise, wearily, that in the end none of that will make much difference: bottom rail might get on top for a while, and the direction of injustice might be temporarily reversed, but the essential unjust dynamic of human society wouldn’t change. Still, bottom rail might enjoy the view from the top for a while, and top rail might find itself suitably chastened by even a temporary demotion—or perhaps the demotion would just whet its appetite for restoration and vengeance.

MORAL MAN AND IMMORAL SOCIETY should be required reading for anyone interested in politics—which is to say, ideally, for all citizens. It’s also well worth re-reading from time to time, which is what I am presently doing.  In its pages a reader will find, albeit possibly to her dismay, an answer to Rodney King’s question/lament, “Can we all get along?”  The answer, sadly, is No, not really; and Reinhold Niebuhr did as much as anyone to explain why.

Against Contempt

At The American Conservative, Gracy Olmstead today writes about “The Problem of Contempt in Christianity”—but why confine “the problem of contempt” to Christians or to religion in general?   Contempt is the opposite of respect, and it is toxic to all human relationships and to all human societies.  So allow me to generalize and extrapolate from Ms. Olmstead’s remarks: if it’s true that “[People today] are fragmented, and often sneering, about their differences and preferences,” it’s also true that “This division and disdain builds resentment and anger...Rather than experiencing unity, they foster anger and derision.”

Might there be a better way?

“Instead of responding to…differences with contempt, what if we tried to assume the best of the other, looked for shared truths, united on core [values], and spoke with combined honesty and generosity about the things we see as misguided or wrong? What if we spent more time in shared service, “showing interest and support” for those actions we see as laudable and important, rather than merely looking for things to critique in the…“others” around us?”

Lest we feel ourselves morally and/or intellectually compromised by such an approach, Ms. Olmstead hastens to reassure us:

“Of course, this doesn’t mean neglecting the things we see wrong in our [world]. But we shouldn’t forget that [the world] is made up of weak, fallible, and limited human people.”

(Including, I would add, ourselves—weak, fallible, and limited as we are, we might even sometimes be wrong.)

“Our goal,” Gracy Olmstead rightly concludes, “today and for the rest of our lives, should be to build loving, lasting relationships with the people we will spend eternity with…”  And for those who don’t believe in eternity, it should be enough that such relationships will surely enhance and enrich our brief and difficult time upon this earth.

__________________________________________________

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-problem-of-contempt-in-christianity/

History's Winners?

Chuck Klosterman's I WEAR THE BLACK HAT isn't about politics (it's about villainy, which isn't all that far removed), but I was struck by this political observation, if only because it echoes something I wrote recently:

"Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives.  Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop evolving (and social evolution inevitably dovetails with the agenda of those who see change as an abstract positive).  It might take seventy years, but it always happens eventually.  Serious historians are, almost without exception, self-styled progressives.  Radical views--even the awful ones--improve with age."

I'm not convinced by all of that; for instance, I think there are plenty of historians who consider themselves either conservative or (perhaps) ideologically neutral.  Equally, there are plenty of radical views--eugenics, for one, or "social Darwinism"--that don't seem to improve with age at all. Nevertheless, Klosterman's point is one that at least has to be confronted by conservatives: in a world that seems to be about change, how does one defend any given status quo, much less seek a restoration of what has been lost? 

The Young Adults Are Alright

Ross Douthat has read (sort of) a survey from the Pew Research Center, “Millennials in Adulthood,” and he has used his bully pulpit at the New York Times to sound the alarm about the findings:

“IN the future, it seems, there will be only one “ism” — Individualism — and its rule will never end. As for religion, it shall decline; as for marriage, it shall be postponed; as for ideologies, they shall be rejected; as for patriotism, it shall be abandoned; as for strangers, they shall be distrusted. Only pot, selfies and Facebook will abide — and the greatest of these will probably be Facebook.” ¹

That this is a tendentious caricature (at best) of the survey can be determined just from that last sentence—even Ross Douthat isn’t silly enough to belief that Millennials will spend their lives devoted to “pot, selfies, and Facebook”.  Regardless, Ross is serious about the survey’s dire implications for our social and political life:

“That’s the implication, at least, of what the polling industry keeps telling us about the rising American generation, the so-called millennials.  A new Pew survey, the latest dispatch from the land of young adulthood, describes a generation that’s socially liberal on issues like immigration and marijuana and same-sex marriage, proudly independent of either political party, less likely to be married and religious than earlier generations, less likely to identify as patriotic and less likely — by a striking margin — to say that one’s fellow human beings can be trusted.

“The common denominator is individualism, not left-wing politics: it explains both the personal optimism and the social mistrust, the passion about causes like gay marriage and the declining interest in collective-action crusades like environmentalism, even the fact that religious affiliation has declined but personal belief is still widespread.”

Douthat goes on to invoke Robert Nisbet’s 1953 classic QUEST FOR COMMUNITY; he does so apparently without realizing that his worries about “individualism” are thus revealed to be absolutely nothing new.²  In fact, they’re something of a chestnut; American conservatives (and some on the Left) have been lamenting the loss of community and of “mediating institutions” for decades now.  Conservatives, however, have also simultaneously been cheerleaders both for capitalism (the very system that has tended to undermine community in the first place³) and for Randian individualism (in fairness to Douthat, he has not been guilty of that, at least).

More importantly, Mr. Douthat has both cherry-picked the Pew survey (it’s available online⁴, should you care to cherry-pick it for yourself) and completely ignored at least one important factor in the results—economic uncertainty/insecurity.  Nowhere does Douthat suggest that social views might be influenced by economic realities; he’s too busy going on about Big Ideas to bother looking at silly things like stagnant wages, outsourced jobs, a near-collapse of the financial system, burdensome personal debt, and lingering levels of high unemployment (and underemployment).

The folks at Pew know better, fortunately.  Read through their report and you’ll see they point out (for example) that, although Millennials have been putting off marriage,  “Most unmarried Millennials (69%) say they would like to marry, but many, especially those with lower levels of income and education, lack what they deem to be a necessary prerequisite—a solid economic foundation.”  Given that “Millennials are also the first in the modern era to have higher levels of student loan debt, poverty and unemployment, and lower levels of wealth and personal income than their two immediate predecessor generations (Gen Xers and Boomers) had at the same stage of their life cycles,” one can understand a certain hesitation on their part to start up families.

Similarly, when it comes to “social distrust,” the Pew authors point out that “sociologists have theorized that people who feel vulnerable or disadvantaged for whatever reason find it riskier to trust because they’re less well-fortified to deal with the consequences of misplaced trust”; in other words, the level of social trust drops in hard times, as other citizens become competitors for scarce resources (jobs) rather than sharers in prosperity.⁵ 

Economics are only one factor, of course; technology is another.  Millennials might seem to be indifferent individualists to Douthat, but in reality “They have also taken the lead in seizing on the new platforms of the digital era—the internet, mobile technology, social media—to construct personalized networks of friends, colleagues and affinity groups.” It’s reasonable to speculate as to whether these networks and affinity groups will prove as sturdy and as socially useful as more old-fashioned institutions (the Elks Lodge, the Knights of Columbus, the Ku Klux Klan Chamber of Commerce, etc.), but it’s also reasonable to point out that previous generations didn’t have the option of personalized digital networks, and to suggest that they probably would have seized it if it had been available. It’s less ideology than it is opportunity that prompts Millennials to go online.⁶ 

As for patriotism, the Pew survey doesn’t say it’s being abandoned; in fact, it says that 49% of Millennials agree that the phrase “a patriotic person” describes them well (35% say the phrase is a “perfect” description).  True, that’s a lower percentage than registered by previous generations; on the other hand, Millennials “are also somewhat more upbeat than older adults about America’s future, with 49% of [them] saying the country’s best years are ahead…” I’ll take upbeat optimism over self-ascribed “patriotism” any time.

Religion?  Douthat is correct that both religious belief and religious affiliation are on the decline: “[Millennials are] less likely to say they believe in God. A solid majority still do—86%—but only 58% say they are “absolutely certain” that God exists, a lower share than among older adults, according to a 2012 survey by the Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project.” Perhaps these numbers reflect the fact “that fully a third of older Millennials (ages 26 to 33) have a four-year college degree or more—making them the best-educated cohort of young adults in American history.”  Still, 86% believing in God doesn’t sound like a major decline in belief to me—maybe Douthat, good Catholic that he is, is disturbed by the lack of “absolute certainty”?  Even so, he ought not ignore what the report’s authors mention: “But if past is prologue, these young adults may develop a stronger belief in God over the course of their lives, just as previous generations have.” 

That last observation can be extended beyond religion: “The attitudes formed in early adulthood don’t always stay fixed. In the latest Pew Research survey, about half of all Boomers (53%) say their political views have grown more conservative as they have aged, while just 35% say they have grown more liberal.” Ross Douthat ignores that, since it’s inconvenient for his thesis; he’d rather just extrapolate from current attitudes, assuming them to be etched in stone and assuming that Millennialls will still be all about pot, selfies, and Facebook even when they enter the retirement home (set up for Wi-Fi, no doubt).

If Mr. Douthat is worried about increased individualism and the loss of community, he should by all means write about it; but he ought not to distort the findings of one particular survey, nor offer that survey as normative, to make his case.  His central concern is that human beings deprived of true community may be duped into joining ersatz substitutes (cults, sects, the Republican Party, etc.) and can be easy prey for charismatic figures (Ayn Rand, Jim Jones, Glenn Beck,  etc.).  That’s always a possibility and always a danger, but there’s nothing in the Millennial mindset, at least so far as this Pew survey indicates, to suggest that Millennials—well-educated, wary, and skeptical as they are—can get played for suckers any more easily than their parents or grandparents (some of whom probably voted for Huey Long, George Wallace, and/or Pat Buchanan).

To quote the noted sociologist Mr. Pete Townshend: I’m pretty sure the kids—the young adults, really, in this case— are alright.

________________________________________________________________

 ¹ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/opinion/sunday/douthat-the-age-of-individualism.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

² A new edition of Nisbet’s “magnum opus” was released in 2010 by SI Books; quite by coincidence, it featured “a brilliant introduction by NewYork Times columnist Ross Douthat”.

³ Along with the automobile, which undermined communities both by providing individuals with greater geographical mobility and by changing the landscape and design of the communities themselves: see any number of books on the subject, but particularly THE GEOGRAPHY OF NOWHERE (James Howard Kunstler) and ASPHALT NATION (Jane Holtz Kay).  While Douthat sees the internet and Facebook as threats to community (and he’s not alone in that), some see them as much needed alternatives to what we had already lost.

⁴ http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2014/03/2014-03-07_generations-report-version-for-web.pdf

⁵ People who lived through the Great Depression will tell you otherwise; they’ll insist that everyone came together back then in neighborly fashion and shared what they had.  Don’t believe those people; they’re old and cranky and their memories are unreliable.

⁶ Bill O’Reilly, of course, insists that Abraham Lincoln wouldn’t have used Facebook; but what did I just tell you about cranky old people?

ADDENDUM: It’s bad enough that Rod Dreher (The American Conservative) thinks that Ross Douthat nailed it perfectly with his Millenials column (did Rod bother to read the Pew survey on which it was based?); worse, he drags T.S.Eliot into the conversation.  Here is Dreher's quote (citation unspecified) from the late Mr. Eliot:

“So long…as we consider finance, industry, trade, agriculture merely as competing interests to be reconciled from time to time as best they may, so long as we consider “education” as a good in itself of which everyone has a right to the utmost, without any ideal of the good life for society or for the individual, we shall move from one uneasy compromise to another. To the quick and simple organization of society for ends which, being only material and worldly, must be as ephemeral as worldly success, there is only one alternative. As political philosophy derives its sanction from ethics, and ethics from the truth of religion, it is only by returning to the eternal source of truth that we can hope for any social organization which will not, to its ultimate destruction, ignore some essential aspect of reality. The term “democracy,” as I have said again and again, does not contain enough positive content to stand alone against the forces that you dislike––it can easily be transformed by them. If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.”

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/gotta-serve-somebody-millennials-douthat-nisbet-eliot/  

Give me, as they say, a freaking break.  Numerous commenters on Mr. Dreher's blog have properly labeled this nonsense for what it is, so I won’t bother.  I’ll just say this: Eliot wrote those words seventy or so years ago; has his dictum come true—has the increasingly secular West turned totalitarian?  Which advanced democracy has instituted concentration camps or established a gulag?  Theists do themselves and their cause no favor by telling the rest of us that unless we serve their God we’re doomed to serve tyrants and monsters instead.